If We Understand That Black lives Matter, Then We Will Overhaul K-12 Education

As a matter of long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core, we will demonstrate that we truly understand that Black Lives Matter by overhauling K-12 education.


The education establishment of the United States has never properly educated the great majority of African American people, and in the broader sense K-12 public education in this nation has never offered academic instruction of excellence to most people.


African Americans have been most victimized by the deficiencies of K-12 public education In the United States.


Consider the history:


Most African American slaves were denied access to literacy. When slavery ended in 1866 with the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution, and when the immediately succeeding 14th and 15th Amendments respectively acknowledged fundamental rights of citizenship and voting rights specifically, the pathway opened for African Americans to gain access to education. But Reconstruction ended with the Compromise of 1877, whereby Democrats granted the contested votes in the very close 1876 presidential election to Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for withdrawal of federal troops from the South.


This left innervated the guarantees of the Reconstruction amendments and created conditions for the rise of hate groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle, Midnight Raiders, and Ku Klux Klan; the advent of Jim Crow; and the “separate but equal” abomination in the decision of the Supreme Court in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Segregation, violence, and the sharecropping system sent multitudes of African Americans scrambling on a Great Northern Migration. 


But in the urban North black people found restrictive housing covenants that directed them to certain parts of the city where, as in the case of African Americans settling in alongside the Jewish population of North Minneapolis, they joined other ethnic groups who also bore the burden of hateful treatment. The Brown v. Board of Education, Topeka, Kansas, decision of the Supreme Court formally ended segregation in 1954, and the Civil Rights victories manifested in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965; in combination with fair housing and employment laws in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s; opened a pathway for African Americans positioned to grab for the middle class American Dream.


Ironically, though, many successful African American people joined whites fleeing the urban core. In North Minneapolis, after rioting on Plymouth Avenue in summer 1967, Jewish people left in droves for St. Louis Park and other suburbs; when many middle class African Americans did the same, this left behind--- as a general rule--- the poorest of the poor.


The Minneapolis Public Schools, like all American systems of K-12 public education, never had offered a superb quality of education. Now mostly white educators were at a loss to provide high-quality education to a Northside population that increasingly included very challenged populations moving in from such places as Gary, Indiana; Southside Chicago; and Kankakee, Illinois.


And that’s where we remain today.


Our locally centralized system of the Minneapolis Public Schools has never provided anything close to a decent K-12 education to African Americans living at the urban core.


The time is now for us to define that education as I have in the immediately succeeding article on this blog and many other places.


If we really believe that Black Lives Matter, then we must formulate a long-term response to the challenges of people living at the urban core by overhauling K-12 education in the Minneapolis Public Schools and across these not yet very United States.